Israel has its own spy agency, and a damned good one. Why would we wait for info from the *chuckle* CIA?
*******
Fair point, how the hell did your great spy agency miss this one?
I don’t know that they did. In 1973, they knew and forewarned of the attack on Yom Kippur by Syria and Egypt. But the Government decided to wait until it actually happened, fearing that another preemptive strike such as was done in ‘67 against Egypt would not sit well with the International Community, as if anything we ever did would (those were naive times). So maybe they missed it. A “great spy agency” is not omniscient. Or maybe the Government waited until it was on, fearing that they’d look like the bad guys if they preemptively swooped into Ghaza again, but picked out the juiciest targets ahead of time, using the info provided by the aforementioned “great spy agency”.
I suspect Hamas when to great effort to mask and misdirect the Israelis. They are evil, but not stupid. They are fighting a generational war and they know the Mossad and the Israeli Defense Force as well as the Israeli’s know them.
The scale of this operation indicates substantial planning, they hit during a holiday. Combined ground assault with rockets. This is difficult to execute without working it out and rehearsing this.